Yes, that must be it. As I understand it, the deconstruction was included in the working copy of his book before Chapter 1, and then later removed, correct?
Edit: Ah, incorrect. He actually intended it to be a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction but never completed it.
Are we sure he never completed it? Or are these just missing parts from the (pirated? preview?) online PDFs?
Because if that's it, then it was just two points he was making, 1. Null-terminated char arrays are "defective"/unsafe, and 2. Don't omit curly braces, for which he seems to have received a lot of backlash, even though those are quite valid points. I'm guessing it may have something to do with taking it up against the grandfathers of C and his rather ...hands-on writing style?
Critique 1. isn't actually that controversial, and does have merit[1], and 2. is a stylistic decision, that even John Carmack[2] would agree on.
Haven't tried that, but it really sounds it would be terrible to the wrists after prolonged use (in which case "prolonged" would mean longer than 10-15 minutes).
Not really surprising. Old MBA 2013 has an awesome keyboard for coding (and is overall a great terminal device), and the Apple Wireless is identical to some MBA/MBP keyboards. The effective distance between the keys and the overall general width of the keyboard are pretty much en par with "proper" desktop keyboards, with excellent responsiveness and key travel. The MBP 2018 is another deal altogether, obviously. Sad, sad story.
I switched from 2016 macbook pro to dell xps 13 running linux. I spent 2 weeks tinkering. Trackpad never worked half as good as MBP. The simple act of closing the display lid did not even put the computer to sleep reliably.
I went back and paid the Apple tax.
Edit: BTW, Windows was running OK on that machine. Linux was fucked. I guess Microsoft is doing great work on WSL2. It might be the solution for me eventually.
I've used this exact setup without problems since 2016 now. I had to upgrade Dell's EFI BIOS, upgrade kernels (b/c Skylake), and upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 once it came out. I remember a very early trackpad driver having serious problems with keeping state, but that went away with a driver update within a week. Never got a problem with the lid; maybe check BIOS settings? It's true that the XPS's trackpad and Linux' power management isn't as nice as Apple's (because nobody's is).
I'm on an earlier model (9343 from 2015) and after the first ~6 months of "beta testing" it actually got quite good and reliable...
...until about a few months ago, when - I suspect due to a kernel upgrade to the 5.0 series - it started not suspending on closing the lid. Oh, and I can no longer run Powertop, because then it will not suspend at all.
This is so frustrating about using Linux - you get a random regression and then the only thing you can do is pray that someone will eventually fix it down the line.
I have been running Arch (Gnome/Wayland) on a Dell XPS13 9380 for more than 6 months now without any issue except the fingerprint reader not being recognized.
The Arch wiki page for the 9370 really helped, especially since initially the battery was draining on sleep, not after applying the recommendations.
I dock it on USB-C 3.1 dock. The display switches instantly.
The Gnome/Wayland fractional scaling is however not good, the image is blurry. I don't use it.
This might have seemed as a superficial witticism, but it's not meant as one (honestly!).
There's a fundamental difference in approach towards hardware and software that's cultivated slowly, gently, and steadily by Apple. The objective is to shell out money to the company and its ecosystem, and starts with vendor lock-in with proprietary tech and cheap but paid apps in a closed-off app store, to reach to the point of an annual budget for Apple expenditures that follows the latest iterations of their products, which are buffed up with New! Shiny! Features! that aren't much thought out, but are nominally innovative.
Now, if you go the Linux/BSD open source/free software path, you'll be hard pressed to find software to throw money at. Best you could do is donate to support your favourite projects, but that's optional rather than mandatory. After settling down with a nice system configuration, you'll similarly be hard pressed to find reasons to waste money on continued "upgrades", instead opting for something that works, and returning to it. People buying couples (or even stockpiles) of, say, x203's is a good example here. They're not buying the marketed "cutting edge", they're rather opting for something that supports their workflow, at a fraction of a price.
This demonstrates a fundamental difference of attitudes, on the one hand people subscribing to an open-ended channel of (fashionable?) updates in hardware and software, and on the other people maintaining and updating a workflow. Perhaps obviously, I'm viewing this from the slightly biased dev angle (and not necessarily webdev either).
Understandably, video and graphics people may come from different tech cultures and have different expectations, where the Apple way is more or less the only (apparent) way.
TL;DR, I see the Apple mentality as bombastic value inflation with more varnish than wood, while the FOSS camp as gradual value increase albeit with the occasional splinters.
Disclaimer: I do make daily use of my MBA 11" 2013, but I'd be hard-pressed to change it. Yet if I'm forced to, I'd probably not go for lustre, but for something equally functional. (Think of a "My other laptop runs OpenBSD" bumper sticker.) When I need to offload a build cycle that'd take too long on the MBA, I do so on a Fujitsu rather than a Mac Pro.
There you go. Downvote a guy to assure a better explanation.
It would seem as too much of a shot in the dark with questionable ROI for a non-technical (and probably even a technical) manager. From their perspective it would seem as the equivalent of introducing an inexperienced programmer into the team (as your Lisp experience will initially be understandably zero), and there wouldn't be anyone in the immediate vicinity to help with peer review or mentoring. Perhaps it would be more effective to learn Lisp on your own through a few hobby projects, and then gradually (and gently) introduce it as a potential solution for work projects? This does depend on your team's structure, though,
If anyone here has introduced Lisp into their workplace, I too would love to know their approach, be it successful or not. Although I'd be more interested in proper Lisp (OK, and Scheme) than Clojure, the latter wouldn't hurt either.
I think it's worth a try. The company is organized into small teams, and the HR department places a big emphasis on people learning new skills. We have a big catalog of in-house classes that are scheduled and taught every month (or quarter, depending on the complexity) with the purpose of promoting personal and professional growth.
While Lisp is not core to what I do, neither is cooking, yet the company gives us classes in that, too. So I think I have a shot.
Definitely go for it, then, and try to do Common Lisp rather than anything else. You can always expand later to JVM-based Clojure, or indeed contract to Scheme, but it's good to start with the thing itself.
The world always needs more good Lisp programmers.
(Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure, so it's nice to see large-scale Lisp success stories. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, as it's one of my two favourite languages (the other one being, of course, C).
Edit: APL is a close third, but let's be realistic.
APL is the ITS of the programming world: Both are immensely powerful and quirky, and were designed by people with a real allergy to typing. It would be nice if there were an Open Source APL which was the equivalent of SBCL in terms of being the default and feature-complete implementation; it would also be nice if APL were elegant as opposed to merely terse.
"On Lisp" is a good book but perhaps too advanced for an introduction, whereas his "ANSI Common Lisp"[0] is better suited to the purpose. Barski's "Land of Lisp" has also received positive feedback.[1]
I'd be interested to see what others consider a suitable general learning path for Lisp.
The usual starting book is 'Practical Common Lisp' by Peter Seibel. Some advanced stuff then in 'Common Lisp Recipes' by Edi Weitz. Some older advanced stuff with examples: Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, Cases Studies in Common Lisp (PAIP) by Peter Norvig.
What made you think it was “no longer in use?” It’s a very big world. Just because something isn’t mentioned regularly in headlines doesn’t mean it’s not out there.
I would imagine Clojure has more use than Lisp. It's a valid question which is better to learn, not one I'm qualified to answer, though. All I would say is that the Clojure community seems more active, and less prickly than the Lisp one.
This is getting downvoted and I don't see why. CL is easily in the top 10 programming languages I see mentioned on HN and it also comes up regularly outside of HN, yet the amount of people actually using it in production seems miniscule.
HN being one of the few places online where Lisp enthusiasts can find new Lisp-related content and discuss it with other enthusiasts is very different from HN being "full of Lisp zealots" They're still very much in the minority here.
Edit: Ah, incorrect. He actually intended it to be a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction but never completed it.